Interest of large electronic health care databases in addictovigilance: Lessons from 15 years of pharmacoepidemiological contribution.

In France, the monitoring of drug abuse and dependence is based on the implementation of national surveys and the collection of spontaneous reports of health professionals. Medico-administrative information completes these data sources through the creation of pharmacoepidemiological tools to exploit them in the field of addictovigilance. This article purposes an overview of this contribution through the presentation of several studies and/or methods developed by the French addictovigilance network to assess the psychoactive drugs diversion and its consequences at the population level. These examples underline the value of these databases and confirm that they could become a systematic routine tool for addictovigilance, particularly in complementary multi-source approaches.